Microsoft Power BBI is a suite that includes Business Intelligence (BI), reporting, data visualization software, and services geared toward teams and individuals. Power BI stands out with the ability to publish and distribute data more efficiently and integrate it into various Microsoft tools and products. But is it a suitable option for your company?
What exactly is Microsoft Power BI?
“Power BI,” Microsoft says, “is an enterprise analytics tool which lets you see the data you have and then share information across your business or integrate them into your website or app.” It is a combination of several products and services. Its value and flexibility stem from leveraging the various elements and how they interact.
Power BI service
Power BI service is a secure Microsoft cloud-hosted service that allows users to view dashboards, reports, and Power BI apps and type of content that blends dashboards and reports via the web browser or mobile apps available for Windows iOS, and Android.
Power BI Desktop
Power BI Desktop is a free self-service data analysis and reports authoring software installed on your Windows computer. It can connect with more than 70 local and cloud-based data sources to transform data into interactive visualizations. Data researchers and developers use Power BI Desktop to produce reports and publish them through users of the Power BI service. A Power BI Course will help you learn how to produce a report in Power BI Desktop.
The Power BI Desktop Power BI Desktop, users can:
- Connect to data
- Model and transform the data
- Create graphs and charts
- Create dashboards and reports that contain visuals
- Share reports with other users using this Power BI service.
Power BI Pro
Power BI Pro is cloud-based software that charges a monthly subscription cost of $10 for each user. The main distinction between Power BI Desktop and Power BI Pro is the capability to work with the other Power BI users and distribute reports and visualizations to other Power BI subscribers across the company
In PowerBI Pro, users can: Power BI Pro users can:
- Integrate Power BI visuals into Power BI applications
- Integration with different Microsoft solutions, for example, Azure Data Services
- Make dashboards, data, and reports with other Power BI users
- Create workspaces -places where colleagues can collaborate to design a collection of dashboards and other reports.
- Let peer-to-peer sharing be enabled — a method to share dashboards and reports with individuals outside the organization with a Power BI Pro license.
Power BI Premium
Power BI Premium isn’t an application like Power BI Desktop and Pro. Premium provides an organization with space and capacity on the Microsoft cloud for sharing reports. The company can decide the best way to use its allocated capacity, according to the number of users, the demands for workload, or other elements, and then scale it up or down according to the needs.
In Power BI Premium Power BI Premium users get:
- Reports can be published across the entire enterprise without having users have a separate license per user
- More scale and better performance than shared capacity within the Power service for BI
- The ability to manage BI assets on-premises using Power BI Report Server
- A single API interface, uniform collection of API capabilities as well as access to the most recent capabilities for embedded analytics
Premium and Pro considerations
If your business has a lot of individuals who make visualizations and reports and do not share data often, then the Pro subscription could be enough. If you have to communicate the data within and outside of your company, then you’ll require an upgrade to a Premium subscription. Power BI Premium prices are by the number of virtual cores Microsoft allocates for the program. The prices are listed on Power BI’s pricing page.
Power BI Report Server
Report Server is an in-house report server on-premises. Reports can be created using Power BI Desktop or Pro, and users can access Report Server to access these reports through the web mobile or browser or to receive them via email. Report Server would be useful for companies that have limitations on cloud usage.
Power BI Mobile
Power BI has mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 mobile devices that allow users to connect to data and interact with it.
Power BI Embedded
Power BI Embedded lets developers integrate Power BI reports and dashboards into other programs in the organization they work for that require users to sign in to a Power BI account or within an application for customers or clients that don’t have an account Power BI login.